Weekly Poll: What Apps Could You Not Live Without?

Imagine you’re walking out of the Apple Store with a brand new MacBook under your arm, or perhaps you’re carting out one of the brand-new wall mounted iMacs (yes, we’re wishing we had one of those — say, the top-speced 27″ one — too). You plug in your Mac, savor the familiar-yet-new startup ding, then connect to the internet. You’re ready to start loading up your Mac with the best apps, and you can’t wait to get it feeling like a productive machine.

Only this time, there’s a twist: you can only install 5 apps. That’s right: you can install anything you want from the net or the App Store, but you’re limited to using the built-in apps and up to 5 more apps you install. What apps would make the cut?

The past few weeks, we’ve been featuring roundups of our team’s favorite apps in the Apps We Use series, and we’ve got a ton more workflows to feature over the upcoming weeks. Some of us have extremely streamlined workflows consisting of only a few apps, while others have a ton of apps they use to get their work done.

Sublime Text for writing, since it’s great for plain-text writing as well as coding

Transmit for FTP, to publish articles to my site (which uses the flat-file CMS Kirby)

There’s a ton more apps I use daily and that I’d want to use, but these would be the minimum I’d need to keep working. Now, how about you? What 5 apps would you install if you could only have 5 apps on your Mac? Let us know in the comments below!

I felt the same until I got the powerpack. Now, with Alfred, I can translate text into any language, paste plain text that’d been copied with formatting, find links to apps on the App Store, get info from Wolfram|Alpha without going to their site, play iTunes music without opening iTunes, create plain text notes right from the search box, and much more. It’s nothing short of amazing, in my opinion :)

I love Reeder too, and they posted on their Twitter that Reeder won’t be going away. They’re finding a solution around the Google Reader problem. =)

So looks like you’ll live after all! =)

James Tarbotton

March 19th

Regarding VLC – I recently gave up VLC and made the switch to MPlayerX with no regrets! It loads faster, the shortcuts are more intuitive, it’s updated fairly often, its available on the mac app store and it’s more “mac-like” I’d encourage you to check it out!

onereandomguy

April 26th

Even in it’s lite form, Alfred is better because it learns what you use + it’s far more flexible (e.g. open files command is separate from open application, direct search in web engines such as Google, Wolfram Alpha or any other etc.).
Check out XBMC or Plex if you want a real media player.

1 password
Alfred
Some incarnation of BBEdit, but I’ll gladly replace them as soon as a viable alternative appears because I sincerely hate their business model.
Transmit
Virtualbox

Andreas Svensson

March 19th

Check out Textwrangler if you haven’t. Free on App Store.

Daniel

March 21st

TextMate (2) is free now and way better than TextWrangler. It’s in alpha-ish right now but I’ve found it quite stable. Also check out Sublime Text…3 I guess? But their business model (charging for a small upgrade not terribly long after 2 came out) is questionable also.

Scrivener – Software people would invade countries for !
Devonthink Pro – If you have serious document management needs its the one, but please can we have customisable meta data now
PdfPenPro – Fast & essential pdf editor
Acrobat X Pro – slow, expensive and horrible pdf editor. Doesnt conform to any of the std mac conventions but the big daddy of pdf for the (increasingly fewer) tasks PDF Pro cant handle
Pycharm – for writing code in python to make all these tools work together
Grandtotal/Timings – You have to bill for all your work but I do wish timings sync was more reliable
MS Word – the standard if you are exchanging text documents and reviewing with other people
Curio – Project management, outlining – its like goo which fills the spaces around everything else
Dropbox, Totalfinder, Bettertouchtool-The basic essentials

Mackley

March 19th

– Alfred
– Things
– 1Password
– Dropbox
– Day One

danny

March 19th

Pro Tools
Reaper
Sleipnir
Notify
Xtrafinder

Jenn

March 19th

1. dropbox
2. sublime text 2
3. forklift
4. handbrake
5. itunes
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Though this is taking into account that apache and php is on the mac still and it can be altered from command line.

The popularity of Alfred never fails to stagger me bearing in mind Quicksilver can do way more, has more choice of interface, is under just as active development, support wise is second to none and is free. Every so often I go check Alfred out & conclude it’s Quicksilver for little baby children lol.
Quicksilver
BetterTouchTool
YoruFukurou
Vox
Dwellclick or Popclip – as it’s the same dev if these rules applied universally Im sure he’d combine them.

Albert Kinng

March 19th

Quicksilver was my first. Then LaunchBar was inside an Apps bundle and I was enjoying the ride until I discover Alfred. It was what I was looking for. It’s popular because of the same thing Apple iDevices are popular… Simplicity. Inside is a complicated monster but it doesn’t scare you as Quicksilver and it doesn’t confuse you as LaunchBar.

stuckfly

March 19th

iTunes, I still use it daily even though the “upgrade” is garbage, imo
Turnover, the best manual bmp tagger (automated ones are unreliable)
Bean, free word processor
LastPass plugin, better than 1Password but the mobile version is useless
Skitch, the old version—Evernote’s rebuild is tragic
NeoOffice, because I gotta get work done

1. Alfred (I forget this is even an app because it feels like it should be part of OS X)
2. 1Password – I wouldn’t be able to log into anything without it.
3. Things – It keeps my life running smoothly.
4. Reeder – My source for my staying in touch with what’s going on.
5. A web browser – I default to Safari, but if I’m troubleshooting with a customer, I need to be able to switch to Firefox or Chrome.